Software development and distribution in large enterprise computing environments may depend on a number of different developers contributing to the eventual product. A developer may depend on services provided by other developers or environments within the enterprise. Often, an individual developer has little or no control over services which are provided by other developers.
Software development which depends on other services and environments makes it difficult to test whether an application will function in the computing environment in which it is installed. Typically, this means applications are distributed into a new environment, and run for some amount of time to determine whether any problems exist with the application in that environment. While localized application installers can perform limited testing of whether installation in the new environment is suitable, application errors may result from network dependencies or application functions in the environment which may not be apparent during an initial installation.